International Museum Exhibitions
The following guide to museum shows currently on view is compiled from Artforum’s three-times-yearly exhibition preview. Subscribe now to begin a year of Artforum—the world’s leading magazine of contemporary art. You’ll get all three big preview issues, featuring Artforum’s comprehensive advance roundups of the shows to see each season around the globe.
Joćo Penalva, Mister, 1999, color video projection, 26 minutes and 18 seconds; projection and sound equipment, canvas, lights, chairs, wood poles, sand bags, dimensions variable.
“Joćo Penalva: Works With Text and Image”
KUNSTHALLEN BRANDTS
ODENSE
Through May 28
Curated by Isabel Carlos
Joćo Penalva’s most ambitious survey show to date smartly brings together a full complement of his work, from his rarely seen allegorically driven paintings of the 1980s and ’90s through his more recent multimedia installations and videos. The exhibition will focus on the Portuguese-born, London-based artist’s postmodern exploration of narrative and theatricality: In Wallenda, 1997–98, one of two large-scale installations presented here, a sound track of Penalva whistling the entirety of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is paired with footage of legendary tightrope walker the Great Wallenda teetering across a high wire; and a restaging of the artist’s 1997 Ormsson Collection addresses the relationship between collective memory and personal identity as it presents the holdings of a fictional Icelandic art collector. The accompanying catalogue will include essays by the curator and Rachel Withers, among others.
— Miguel Amado
Gerrit Rietveld, Rietveld-Schröder House, 1924, Utrecht, the Netherlands, rendering showing girl’s sleeping area, 1951, collotype on paper, 19 1/4 x 25 1/2".
“Gerrit Rietveld: The Revolution of Space”
VITRA DESIGN MUSEUM
WEIL AM RHEIN, GERMANY
Through September 16
Curated by Amelie Znidaric, Laura Hompesch, and Ida van Zijl
No design emblematizes De Stijl as powerfully as Gerrit Rietveld’s canonical Red Blue chair (1918/1923), with its demonstration of what Theo van Doesburg admiringly described as a tension between structural necessity and the “firm visualization of open spaces.” But Rietveld’s oeuvre cannot be reduced to De Stijl contributions alone. In an effort to more broadly situate the Dutch architect and designer, Vitra has gathered more than four hundred objects, drawings, and photographs—including the ever au courant Zig-Zag chair (ca. 1934), materials related to his incomparable 1924 Schröder house, and many seldom-seen prototypes, models, and designs, as well as works by Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier—which, taken together, promise to contextualize Rietveld’s career and creations anew. Ida van Zijl, of Utrecht’s Centraal Museum, draws on decades of research in her contribution to the catalogue.